Monday, November 28, 2011

NHK News on 11/28/2011 has a clip that shows exactly the same "decon" method but without any tarp to at least shield the soil from radioactive materials being sprayed down.

This "advanced technology decontamination" as per Minister Hosono will be used by 600 fruit orchards (2200 hectares) in 3 municipalities in Fukushima (Date City, Kunimi-machi, Koori-machi) starting in the middle of December. And the fruit farmers themselves will get to do the decon job.

NHK News also has this from the head of the JA in Date City:

「農家の方には、大変な負担になると思うが、安全な果物を消費者に届けるには、早急に除染をしなければならない。一日も早く完了させたい」

"I know it will be a heavy burden on the fruit farmers, but in order to deliver safe fruits to consumers we need to do decontamination as soon as possible. We want to finish it as soon as possible."

Ummm. No thank you. And what is the point of power-washing the radioactive materials off the trees into the ground so that the roots can absorb?

Has Fukushima Prefecture done any study to show that this power-washing method is effective?

Power-washing with high pressure water does much damage to trees, and makes them prone for fungi attack via the lesions in the bark. The same goes with all that scraping. Fungi infestations are being spread perfectly this way, damaging hurt and otherwise weakened trees first.

I am no professional gardener, I just happen to own several trees in my garden that I love (and their fruit), like apple, cherry, peach and a few more. Every garden hobbyist in Germany knows about these basic prophylactic rules when dealing with trees to avoid spreading possible infections.

And this tarp... are they kidding? The dirt will just flow down the tarp, settling in the soil just one or two meters farther.

Correct me if I am wrong, but are they not also damaaging the new fruit spurs? Did anyone tell them about that--the spurs/buds are fragile. So spreading disease in a stressed tree, damaging fruit spurs(!) and washing all the radiactivity into the ground. While them may get a "crop" --where do they think the materials to GROW the fruit comes from? Its not the air..its the soil. Next they will remove the soil from the tree..and wonder why the plant finally dies...Genius personified...

Radioactive substances decay at a known rate. That is why people are still not living around Chernobyl. It's not yet safe. The authorities should not hold out false hopes of decontamination. The area around the plant - and it is a large area - are not going to go back home. But all TEPCO can think of is avoiding compensation. As before, it's all about money.

I know that the Japanese people are much better educated than this. Don't blame them. A certain "Minister Hosono" is promoting this plan, and it is merely smoke and mirrors. I doubt this plan will fool very many people, especially if a Redneckistanian like myself can see that it is worse than useless. Not only that, but the tree still has leaves, so I doubt that this video was produced recently. It's almost December, for cryin' out loud.

No the Japanese are not better educated, they are cleverly brainwashed, ask anyone who went to school over here, even EXSKF himself will tell you... anyway here is the main point 'All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.'

"Maybe the radiation is affection their judgment"No, but with a good cocktail of stress, denial of the implications, bad knowledge of nature's mechanisms and bliend belief you could barely be slowly boiled like a frog!

I'm sorry, but those orchard fruits from Fukushima are ultimately going to be unfit for sale. But, I think they can use the land very effectively for radioactive storage or for solar panels or wind turbines to replace all nuclear plants.

Also, some of the worst fallout areas around Chernobyl have been reclaimed by native animals and birds, minus some genetic mutations, reduced populations, etc. The orchards might go that way eventually!...

this is obviously a ridiculous plan only meant for the media. and there is absolutely no way they will perform this on every tree in the orchard. 600 orchards x a few hundreds trees in each = no freaking way!!

the farmers know that the gov't/pref. isn't REALLY testing any of these foods properly. all anybody cares about is making money and acting like all is well. I'm so glad I live down in western japan away from this madness!!

“Before the biological effects of radiation were known, many physicians and corporations had begun marketing radioactive substances as patent medicine, glow-in-the-dark pigments, and radioactive quackery. Examples were radium enema treatments, and radium-containing waters to be drunk as tonics. Marie Curie protested this sort of treatment, warning that the effects of radiation on the human body were not well understood (Curie later died from aplastic anemia, which was likely caused by exposure to ionizing radiation). By the 1930s, after a number of cases of bone necrosis and death in enthusiasts, radium-containing medical products had been largely removed from the market.”

Astonishing Lapri, the very definition of "half-arsed". A purely reactive and inadequate non-response. It will not be effective, is likely to kill the plant and likely to send farmers broke, but indicative of the severity of an actually intractable problem. I even see people now seriously suggesting a decontamination of the SEA FLOOR!

It's insane! These people don't grasp that you aren't washing some particles off. This is why Chernobyl has an exclusion zone. It doesn't wash off! You can't rid the area of metallic radionuclides, or else an exclusion zone wouldn't have been necessary, it could have just been wiped or sprayed away.

It's molecular scale contamination. You would need destructive chemistry techniques to separate and remove it, but using chemistry on soil or ocean sediment is NOT even an option, and even if you could do it at the scales involved, which you certainly can't, it would kill everything in the process.

Half-arsed attempts like this simply spread it around fruitlessly (sorry, pun unintended).

And when it doesn't work the paper-pushers will come back with: "see, if you had done exactly what we told you, when we told you to do it, you would be fine, so don't blame us, when it's all your own fault." ... etc.

It really is insane what's coming from these incompetent paper-pushers, who seem to be doing nothing but translating the blame and responsibility to the little people. For some problems there are no practical, viable, affordable or acceptable or useable technical methods for dealing with them. This contamination is one of those.

About my coverage of Japan Earthquake of March 11

I am Japanese, and I not only read Japanese news sources for information on earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant but also watch press conferences via the Internet when I can and summarize my findings, adding my observations.

About This Site

Well, this was, until March 11, 2011. Now it is taken over by the events in Japan, first earthquake and tsunami but quickly by the nuke reactor accident. It continues to be a one-person (me) blog, and I haven't even managed to update the sidebars after 5 months... Thanks for coming, spread the word.------------------This is an aggregator site of blogs coming out of SKF (double-short financials ETF) message board at Yahoo.

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